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Tight Purse Strings Don't Hobble Two Clubs

LONDON — Front-runners may not win the race, but Mainz and Valencia, the pacesetters in Germany and Spain, do not look like teams that will quietly fade away.

Their pedigrees are similar. Each has a youthful, thoughtful, thoroughly modern coach. Each operates on a relative shoestring compared with the big payers in their league. And each plays with a style that is pleasing to the eye while demanding full effort from the squad.

Mainz 05 on Saturday equaled a record that only Bayern Munich and Kaiserslautern have reached in the past. Its seventh win in the first seven games of the Bundesliga came with a 4-2 home victory over Hoffenheim. Later that night, the carnival in the Rhine was echoed in Valencia, as it maintained its form in La Liga by beating the tough Basques, Athletic Bilbao, 2-1.

Valencia is traditionally a bigger club than Mainz has ever been, but debts forced Valencia to sell off its star players in the summer. Its cavernous Mestalla arena has seen better days — better decades — but it will have to suffice until its cripplingly expensive new stadium is finally completed.

But in both Mainz and Valencia, the tightening of purse strings has turned from handicap to opportunity. The team trainers, Thomas Tuchel and Unai Emery, might never have been given their chance at this level if their clubs had been flush with the funds that high-rolling coaches like José Mourinho or a Rafael Benítez demand wherever they go.

That is the point. Tuchel and Emery, each in his mid-thirties, with a passion for playing the sport that was thwarted by a knee injury, know they cannot spend millions on established star players. Team play has to be the essence, but it need not be dull or defensive.

If you watch Mainz or Valencia right now, you see high-tempo, highly interchangeable movement, and, of course, high motivation. At the core of it is the belief that work ethic is neither a defensive nor an attacking preserve.

You control the games by controlling the space on the field. If you have the ball, you attack with every available man. If the opponent has the ball, you hunt it down and, in that modern phrase much seen and heard at the World Cup in June and July, you “squeeze the space.”

It is not as glorious as watching Lionel Messi or Cristiano Ronaldo in full flight. But the way that Tuchel and Emery coach is not ugly by any means.

The Mestalla was rocking Saturday for the second night in a week. The team had lost, unluckily, to a late goal against Manchester United in the Champions League on Tuesday. And though Manchester struggled to find a rhythm in a 0-0 draw at Sunderland on Saturday, Valencia refused to make exhaustion its excuse. Valencia carried the game to the Basques, whose record on the road has been redoubtable this season. With swift, persistent raids down both flanks and with fullbacks as well as wingers flying, Valencia pressed back Bilbao.

Photo

Mainz’s Adam Szalai of Hungary celebrated after winning the German first division Bundesliga soccer match with Hoffenheim on Saturday.Credit
Frank Augstein/Associated Press

Its opening goal was sumptuous. Pablo Hernández backheeled the ball to Roberto Soldado, and the cut-rate replacement for the departed David Villa dashed toward the goal line. Then, seeing Aritz Aduriz, another of Valencia’s bargain replacements, in the goalmouth, Soldado unselfishly chipped the ball up for Aduriz to head the goal.

All in the blink of an eye. All done with a flourish. All coordinated between players who came together after the summer sales that helped pay off a fifth of Valencia’s monstrous €500 million bank debt.

Soldado had cost €10 million, or $13.8 million, from Getafe, about a quarter of the fee Valencia received from Barcelona for Spain’s hottest goal scorer, Villa. Aduriz, a product of Bilbao’s soccer academy, cost just €4 million.

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But in holistic teamwork like Valencia’s, every man, and not just the strikers, must earn his place. The performance Saturday night owed much to the mixture of creativity and sweat of the playmaker Manuel Fernandes, the Portuguese who was in the side only because the regular rhythm-master, the Argentine Éver Banega, was injured.

Valencia could and should have scored more goals for its pulsating first-half performance. But Bilbao changed its own pattern after the break, turned defense into attack and forced a visibly tiring Valencia to prove that its team spirit is as willing on the back foot as the front.

Beyond the 90th minute, Valencia scored a second time, a classic counterattack culminating in substitute Vicente Rodriguez’s cutting in from the left wing to score with his right foot. Even then, even two goals up, Valencia could not rest. Igor Gabilondo scored for Bilbao with a free kick into the top corner of the net with barely a minute of injury time remaining. Bilbao’s defiance was still not enough to dampen the Valencia celebration.

The 20,000 Mainzer regulars really know how to celebrate. Their club’s rise to the top is excuse enough for the fans to let rip with the carnival song, the Narrhallamarsch, and on Saturday it was heard four times.

As has happened every week since August, even on such away grounds as Bayern Munich, Mainz has outrun, out-thought and often outwitted the other sides.

Saturday’s man of the match was Lewis Holtby. The 20-year-old son of a former English soldier who was stationed on the Rhine, Holtby orchestrated the first goal with a pass that Germany coach Joachim Löw described as worth the admission price.

Holtby played a part in three goals and scored one. But such is Germany’s stock of young professionals that Löw is happy to leave him, and the rising Mainz striker André Schürrle, in the under-21 side. For Mainz, though, they are senior players, though the club does not own either of them. Holtby is on loan from Schalke, and Schürrle is a done deal for Leverkusen next season.

Tuchel is not banking on his team’s claiming the outright Bundesliga record by winning an eighth straight game at the start of a season. But his credo of one step at a time on Saturday defeated his first mentor, Hoffenheim’s trainer, Ralf Rangnick. When injury ended Tuchel’s playing career at 24, Rangnick, then his coach, invited the younger man to train his under-14s. “That,” said Tuchel, “is how things started.”